“Other places and languages become possible”: Oxford scholar Rajendra Chitnis on the value of studying Czech literature
Dr Rajendra Chitnis is the University of Oxford’s champion of Czech, each year enthusing new cohorts of students with his love for the language and its literature. Encounters with the country and its culture in early adulthood have granted him a unique perspective on Europe, as well as a flawless Czech pronunciation.
In this interview with Danny Bate, Rajendra tells the story of how he first got the bug for all things Czech, introduces his research focus and teaching, and sets out the case for why studying Czech culture offers intellectual benefits.
First encounters
Rajendra, when were you first aware of the Czechs? What were your first contacts with them?
“Probably through music. As a teenager, I played both the piano and the cello, and I sang in a choir. I think we sang a Dvořák Mass fairly early on. That might be one of my earliest experiences, and then other pieces of music by the famous Czech composers.
“Then, when I was a student of Russian at Sheffield University at the beginning of the 1990s, we did a course called ‘Comparative Slavonic Philology’. There was this expectation that we would take a second Slavonic language, at least briefly, alongside Russian, to be better at comparison between Slavonic languages. There was a teacher who came up from Oxford for a term in my second year and taught us some Czech.
“On that basis, I went to summer school in Prague in August 1991, just before my year abroad in Russia. You might know that in August 1991, there was a coup in Moscow. I remember that my teachers and the people who were looking after us at the summer school were absolutely terrified that the Russians were going to come back into Prague. That's probably my first very strong memory of seeing and living their history, as it were.”
In 1991, Czechoslovakia is emerging out of forty years of communism. How did you find the place, in terms of the way it looked? And how did you find the Czechs?
“The summer school is quite a famous thing, and it was already then. One of the things about it is that different academics, not only from the UK, but from all over Europe and North America, often met when they were eighteen or nineteen as students in the summer school. That was my case. David Danaher and Benjamin Frommer, who are both working in Czech history and Czech studies in the US, were on my summer school. Everyone has that sort of story. So I think the Czechs were quite used to us. They were quite excited to have the opportunity to teach us like that.
“It is a great question to ask how things were then. I had nothing to compare it to at that point. I then spent a year in Russia. After I finished my university course, I then lived in Olomouc for three years. So when I was living in Olomouc, I was able to compare Olomouc to Voronezh, where I had lived in Russia. There were very clear comparisons to be made. But I find it hard to remember. I can't tell you whether it was very dilapidated or sad, which is the kind of thing people often say about Czechoslovakia at that time.
“But the Czechs that we met were great. They were really keen to talk to us, to teach us about their culture and language. Also, just really bright, intelligent. They really knew their stuff.”
You say that the Czechs that you were interacting with were keen to talk, but how were those conversations happening? What I'm getting at here is your journey with the Czech language, because I've heard your Czech; it's sublime. How did you get to this state? And do you have any tips for people listening?
“Go to the Czech Republic and live there for a long time! Find a group of people who, in my case, will take you to the pub five nights a week.
“The big advantage we had was that Czechs were not very good at English”
“I didn't speak very good Czech in 1991. These were conversations that I had mainly in English. But when I then went to live in the Czech Republic in 1993, I first taught at the Faculty of Physical Education in Olomouc. They had a compulsory English course there, which I taught. My closest friends, still my closest Czech friends, are people I met then who were basically all students of PE and physiotherapy. They taught me Czech. So it's all down to them. It was all about doing a lot of socialising with people.
“At that time, the big advantage we had was that Czechs were not very good at English. So if you were trying to speak Czech, eventually they would give up trying to speak English, whereas the experience my students have now is that, of course, the Czechs, especially at universities, are extremely good at English. Therefore it's harder to get them to talk to you in Czech.”
Yes, I can imagine that back then it actually was a case of sink or swim, so you had to give it a go. Has that experience and that time in Olomouc left your Czech with a distinct Moravian lilt?
“I'm sure my Czech is very Moravian. I've had no experience of speaking Czech in Prague, or in Bohemia, and my wife is from Zlín. So there might even be a bit of Valašsko in there, Haná and Valašsko.”
Rajendra's research
This country has no shortage of things to study. Why was it specifically literature from the nineteenth century onwards that made you think, ‘This is what I want to do’?
“I'm not sure if it was quite like that. What happened to me was that I worked in Olomouc for three years, and I was hugely interested in many things about Czech society and history. My parents were worried I would end up staying there. So they sent me lots of prospectuses for postgrad courses.
“I took the postgraduate course at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London, where I met Robert Pynsent and David Short, who were the two key figures in Czech studies in Britain. David Short was a linguistic specialist, has written lots of really interesting articles about Czech and Slovak, and speaks amazing Czech and Slovak. Robert Pynsent taught the literature. Really, I think I fell under their spell, or their guidance.
“Robert had an encyclopedic knowledge of Czech and Slovak literature, was hugely enthusiastic about it, and created this environment where his undergraduates and postgraduates would all meet regularly to talk about unusual examples, not the obvious things. So I think it's really down to him.”
No doubt there were such giants of the field already established. But would you say that, as the walls came down, there was an acceleration in Czech studies, with more people coming from the West, and that there was more work to do now that you could access the country again?
“I experienced that very much in the mid-1990s. I was a student at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, which is the place that you would go if you were going to look at that region. At that time, they had well over a hundred postgraduate students taking master's courses and studying all parts of the world. In fact, at the time that I was there, it was during the Yugoslav Civil War or the Yugoslav conflict; that was a huge focus of many people's attention.
“What was amazing was that you had people who studied the culture, people who studied the languages, people who studied the history, the economics and the politics, altogether. There was this amazing exchange about individual places, and then, of course, comparatively, about how these societies in different ways were emerging from the communist experience.”
Within everything that you've been up to over the past couple of decades, what is it about the figure of Vladislav Vančura (1891–1942) that has attracted you so much? Because you've written a book about him.
“Yes, I did write a book about Vančura. I wouldn't pick him out particularly from all of these different things, but I did spend a lot of time reading and writing about him. These things are never quite what you imagine; I was actually planning to write a book about doctors who were writers.
“The problem really was that two of the most obvious Czech examples were Vančura and then Jaroslav Durych, who both wrote an enormous amount. They are also completely different in the way that they write and also politically and so on. So I didn't really get on to Durych, but I've written about him elsewhere. I spent a lot of time in the end writing about Vančura.
“I think I like the challenge most of all. If you talk to Czechs, they generally find Vančura very hard to read. He's got this really amazing grasp of Czech and he read lots of medieval literature, also older dictionaries and dictionaries of sayings. So his vocabulary is very rich and the forms that he uses are fascinating. I found that challenge interesting.
“There are a lot of studies that focus just on Vančura's language, but I wanted to think about, ‘What's the purpose of this? What's he trying to do? What's he trying to say?’ His is a kind of outsized ambition that he has at a time when there is this big moment for Czechoslovakia. It's become the First Republic, but it still often talks about itself as being small and a minor country, even in that period. He's not thinking of himself like that. He's writing like the Russian or American writers of that period. Those writers have this enormous geographical expanse, which he doesn't, but he has this expanse in the language, which is what he really explores.”
Vančura did not survive the Second World War. What was the reception of his work like in the subsequent period, in the communist period and even today?
“He was executed very early on in the Heydrichiáda, which followed the attempted assassination on the Reichsprotektor Heydrich. He was known through the 20s and 30s. He was a member of the Communist Party, certainly in the 20s. They targeted him, but I think that they didn't really realise who they'd executed at the time.
“Therefore, there's a sort of double reception of him. One is as this martyr in the Second World War. Obviously, most of all, the Communist Party wanted very much to celebrate him. But he doesn't fit very easily into this particular Stalinist model of communism, which came in in the late 1940s. He's a very, very important figure.
“I think that they didn't really realise who they'd executed at the time"
“One of the things that I struggled with a bit in my book was trying to break free of a Marxist-Leninist narrative of his work. I think I would do it better now than I did it in the book. I teach him a lot, time has passed, and more things have been written outside the communist period. In twentieth century history, we get very focused on writers’ political allegiances and ideologies. Then also, of course, those ideologies try to shape the reputation of these writers to suit the ideology, rather than the other way around.”
Studying Czech at university
You're based at the University of Oxford at the moment. Oxford is a university that's quite well known for having high standards for getting into the place. But who are the students that turn up to study Czech and Slovak under you? What are their interests? Do they tend to have personal experience of this country?
“They come to me to study Czech and Slovak literature. I do get students quite often who do Czech and history. That's obviously a really exciting and ideal combination. But most of my students actually do Czech with another language. You can't study Czech on its own at Oxford.
“It's really difficult to pin down even one or two things that I would say about them. They come up with all sorts of curious explanations for why they want to do Czech. Much more unusually than you'd expect, they have heritage and connections, like Czech or Slovak grandmas or mums. But that's not by any means the majority, usually just one or two.
“I have had students who wanted to do it because they were really into rock climbing, and they knew that at some point they would be on a rock and would meet Adam Ondra. They wanted to be able to speak to Adam Ondra in his language.
“I had another student who was really into these narrative computer games, and had played this computer game about Bohemian medieval history. He talked to us all about Bohemian medieval history in the context of digital technology. I learned from that that the Czech Republic is actually a major creator of these sorts of games. It’s a nice selling point.
“Students have been there, they've been to Prague. That's sometimes why. There’s the music thing I mentioned before, but very rarely the literature these days. I think that the Milan Kundera period, which was my generation, really has gone.
“But yes, they are looking for something different. They're looking for a challenge. There's something slightly rebellious about them, because everyone is telling them, ‘What's the point of doing Czech? That's not a very useful language’. Well, it might be quite fun. We very rarely, if ever, lose students once they start doing Czech. They like it and they like the puzzle of the language and the puzzle of the culture.”
Thinking back to my own undergraduate days, the first couple of years was as much about unlearning as it was about learning. Do you find that you have to dispel some misconceptions about the Czechs and the Slovaks, and the way that this part of the world works?
“I wouldn't say so with young people, which might be a problem in some ways. Things are taught so fragmentarily now at school, in history for example, that they will know an awful lot about the Munich Agreement. Perhaps they might know an awful lot about the Cold War in general, and possibly therefore a little bit about Czechoslovakia.
“There might be the odd thing that you want to complicate and correct. But actually I think we're given a blank slate, which is actually quite daunting, because I don't want to plant lots of myths in their heads that are just my ideas about it. I try very hard to give them texts, for example, that say different things about the same period, and get them to think a bit more about why people might interpret it in different ways. That's a key part of studying modern languages.”
When you make it over to the Czech Republic and tell people here what you do, what’s the reaction to somebody of your background, based in Oxford, studying and promoting Czech? How do Czechs react to your research?
“I think smiling is a key component of this. I'm not quite sure why they're smiling. Mainly it just seems a bit bonkers that anybody would be doing this. They also ask me who on earth it is that is actually coming to study. They tend to insist that I know much more about it than they do, which I don't think is always true. I think I'm a curiosity, I guess, from that point of view.
“Going back to the point you made about Oxford, I think that Czech works at Oxford. First of all, I mean the way that teaching works at Oxford; we teach in very small groups. If you do French, you get taught in a small group. If you do Czech, you get taught in a small group. So it doesn't feel odd in that sense. More broadly, there's not such a sense of curiosity in whatever people are studying. It seems to belong to Oxford that people are studying odd things. It's when I go out into wider public life that it becomes difficult.”
There might also be a little bit of the small-country mentality that you mentioned previously. And what would be your defence for what you do? What is it about studying Czech and Slovak literature that you see as important and worthwhile?
“As time has gone on, the first thing I would say is that I think it's really important to study languages and literature. Certainly in the UK, but I think throughout the world, we're reaching a real crisis in terms of reading and literature, but also in learning each other's languages in deep and thorough ways. So I would put that first.
“Czech and Slovak are ideal in this respect because you can't do them half-heartedly. You can't half learn these languages. You have to either go in or not. It's a great discipline. I notice it in my students, and I think probably over time they would comment on it afterwards, that it creates quite a change intellectually for them.
“To learn a language like this, and to have the experience of speaking it to Czechs and discovering that it works, from a starting point where you have no idea why you're reading this text, what it's about, what the times were like, to a point where you actually have this really good sense of this place that most people don't really know much about – I think that is, first of all, great for its own sake.
“They often get employment precisely because they've done Czech and Slovak”
“Of course, they're really interesting places to study for their own sake, and students only have to be with us for half a year to realise that. But I also think it means that other places become interesting, and other places and languages become possible. Certainly that's the case with a lot of my students. They often get employment precisely because they've done Czech and Slovak. An employer looks at it and may not say, ‘Oh, I need somebody who speaks those languages’, but does say, ‘I need somebody who would be able to learn other difficult languages’. My students by that time are actually pretty confident that they'll be able to do that.”
I wonder if your students go out into the world being able to offer a pretty unusual perspective? They can go beyond a Europe that is divided into the West and the East; they can reorient Europe and talk about the middle instead, and offer something really quite unique.
“Yes, that's absolutely true. In all sorts of ways, that section of Europe is overlooked, going both ways with East Central Europe as a whole. It really changes the way you look at the geography and history of that space.
“It really changes the way you look at the geography and history of that space”
“The other thing that's interesting is that, as I said, most of my students will study Czech with another language, and that will almost certainly be the language of an empire. So it's really interesting for them, on the one hand, to be studying French or Spanish, with a lot of focus on both the imperial periods and the postcolonial periods, and the experience of Spanish or French-speaking colonies.
“Then alongside that, they're doing Czech. Where does Czech get into this? Is Bohemia a colony? Were they colonised? Were they colonised by the Russians? Not quite, but we can talk about that. Did they colonise Slovakia? And so on. You have these really interesting questions about big and small, coloniser and colonised, and these pervasive narratives of victimhood, which are a contrast with the narratives of greatness that we encounter in the British context. There's this narrative of self-consciousness and a sense of being in different ways victimised, ignored or marginalised, so we look at how that works.
“Seeing the Czechs with a swagger in that period is fun”
“Another thing that's really good fun in that respect and is unique to Oxford in the UK is that the students have to study medieval Czech literature as well, which is great. I'm not a specialist in it, but I really enjoy working with it and teaching students it.
“What's very exciting about it is that when you meet the Bohemians of the fourteenth century, they're not like the Bohemians or Czechs now, because they think they're very important. Charles IV is the Holy Roman emperor and they're right at the centre of their world. They feel they have the right to talk about everything, from philosophy to society, language, history and so on. Seeing the Czechs with a swagger in that period is fun.”
